Academic Intelligentsia: Where Leftover 60’s Terrorists Go for a Second Career

A former Weather Underground radical who spent 22 years in prison for an armored-car robbery that killed two cops and a Brinks guard now reportedly holds a prestigious adjunct professorship at Columbia University’s School of Social Work.

The New York Post reports that Kathy Boudin’s return to respectability after her 2003 parole occurs a week before the release of Robert Redford’s “The Company You Keep,” a movie loosely based on the $1.6 million heist.

Boudin, 69, acted as a getaway driver in the heist and her status as perp-turned-prof outraged the widow of one of her victims, Brinks guard and father of three Peter Paige, who was killed in New York’s Rockland County by her accomplices from the Black Liberation Army on Oct. 20, 1981.

“She doesn’t deserve a job at all,” Josephine Paige, 74, told the Post. “She doesn’t deserve anything, nothing at all. I think she should be back in an institution.”

……In her parole hearing, Boudin — a veteran of the terrorist Weather Underground — claimed that she participated in the robbery because she felt guilty for being white.

……She grew up in a “progressive” household. Her father was a Communist Party activist. She joined the Weatherman faction of SDS whose chief platform was starting a race war in America. Boudin first became a fugitive in October 1969, skipping $20,000 bail for her crimes in the infamous Chicago ‘Days of Rage’ rioting, which left scores of policemen injured and one District Attorney wheelchair-bound. She was next spotted in March 1970, staggering naked out of a demolished townhouse in Greenwich Village – a Weather Underground bomb factory that inadvertently exploded, killing three comrades (the bomb was of the anti-personnel variety and was intended for a dance at Fort Dix).

Boudin survived the explosion and rejoined the Weather Underground which imagined itself a “revolutionary vanguard” setting bombs all over the country. After the implosion of Weatherman at the hands of a Maoist fanatic, Boudin joined the May 19 Communist Organization (May 19 being
the birthday of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh). Their intention was to help a gang of black criminals and murderers create a Communist “New Afrika” in the southern United States.

In 1981 they attempted to rob a Brinks armored car to finance the war of liberation that would create their promised land. Boudin dropped her infant son at the baby sitter’s and took the wheel of the getaway U-Haul. She waited in a nearby parking lot as at least four and possibly more Black Liberation Army terrorists, heavily armed, took another vehicle to a local mall, where a Brinks truck was making a delivery. The terrorists hopped out and immediately began firing at the three Brinks guards – almost severing the arm of guard Joe Trombino and killing his co-worker, Peter Paige. The four then grabbed the cash – $1.6 million of it – and sped off to the waiting Boudin. Their murder and robbery took less than two minutes.

When they reached the U-Haul, the terrorists abandoned their first vehicle and climbed into the back of the truck. They didn’t expect to be seen by a sharp-eyed high-school student, who called the police. When one unit of four police officers spotted and pulled over the U-Haul, they could only see Boudin in the drivers seat. She got out of the cab, hands raised.

Some accounts claim Boudin pleaded with the police to put down their guns, convincing them to drop their guard; others claim Boudin was silent, and the officers relaxed spontaneously. In either case, one thing is clear – although Boudin knew the back of her U-Haul contained six heavily-armed robbers, she did nothing to warn the police. Once their guard was down, six terrorists with automatic weapons burst out of the back of the truck, surprising the four police officers. A black police officer, Waverly Brown, was killed instantly. Just to make sure, one of Boudin’s gangster friends fired into him point-blank as he lay on the ground.

Edward O’Grady lived long enough to empty his six-shot revolver – but as he reloaded, he was shot several times with an M-16. Ninety minutes later, he died on a hospital operating table. The other two officers were lucky to escape with minor injuries. The occupants of the U-Haul scattered, some climbing into another getaway car, others carjacking a nearby motorist. Boudin made the mistake of fleeing on foot. An off-duty corrections officer who just happened to be driving past had the presence of mind to apprehend her.

Three other terrorists failed to escape that day – Boudin’s boyfriend David Gilbert, Samuel Brown, and Judith Clark crashed their own car while negotiating a sharp turn, and were arrested by police. Two days later, Samuel Smith and Nathaniel Burns were spotted in a car in New York. After a gunfight with police that left Smith dead, Burns was captured. Three more participants were arrested several months later.

……She’s relied on the usual support network of the radical left, instead of disavowing and distancing herself from them, and instead of teaching her child that her crimes and the raw hatred that lead to them was wrong, she’s trained him to follow in her anti-American footsteps. On going to prison, Boudin gave custody of her one year old baby boy, Chesa to two friends and former terrorist colleagues, Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn (famous for her public salute to Satanic cultist and mass murderer Charles Manson).

For the next eighteen years, Ayers and Dohrn raised Chesa Boudin in their own image, teaching him to hate America, all with the cooperation and complicity of Boudin. If Boudin had really reformed, she would have removed her child from the custody of two unrepentant terrorists. But she didn’t. If Boudin really regretted her felony murder, she would rebuke her son for declaring that his imprisoned “parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world,” and announcing his dedication to the same cause.

The story of Kathy Boudin’s crimes and her victims is bloody and ugly. Many details get left out or smoothed over, even by her critics. There’s a wider importance to Boudin’s story: it’s yet another example of how the left uses America’s most respected universities as both a breeding ground and a retirement home for radicals; a way to give violent ideologically driven criminals both legitimacy and a paycheck, often at taxpayers’ expense.

A little before noon on March 6, 1970 one of the bombs was accidentally detonated. Cathy Wilkerson was in an upstairs bathroom and Boudin was in the shower when the explosion ripped through the historic townhouse.

As Cathy Wilkerson wrote later, “The whole townhouse rose up a foot or two, shattering bricks and splintering wooden beams, and then was transformed into dust and rubble, shuddering into a deep pit in which a ruptured gas main burst into flame.”

A fully nude Boudin and half-dressed Wilkerson ran into the street. Stunned next door neighbor Dustin Hoffman surveyed the destruction. Hoffman’s wife covered up Boudin and Henry Fonda’s ex-wife took the girls in.

Three members of the Weather Underground weren’t as lucky as Wilkerson and Boudin. Authorities found the “headless body of a young woman, missing both hands and a foot, and riddled with roofing nails.” That was Diana Oughton, Boudin’s fellow Bryn Mawr alumna. Two other terrorists were killed, Terry Robbins and Ted Gold; Robbins body was so completely demolished that he was only identified when the Weathermen announced his loss weeks later.

The pipe bombs were put together with nails and dynamite. They had been intended to be detonated at a dance at New Jersey’s Fort Dix for non-commissioned officers and their wives or girlfriends.

Robert Roth, a former SDS member who was wanted for his participation in the “Days of Rage” riots in Chicago, is now an eighth grade teacher.

Share this:

Like this:

Related

2 responses to this post.

The cowards who killed innocent people in Boston are not even labeled terrorist. These people when caught could look forward to getting a professors job at Columbia twenty years from now. Someone like Robert Redford will probably make a movie about their courage of conviction. What has this world come too? If justice prevails, which I doubt, these terrorist will be dead long before then.